ARCO Madrid 2026
Opening Section
RAVNIKAR
www.ravnikar.org
www.ravnikargallery.space
Neja Tomšič
A Garden, Somewhat Deserted
"'It’s strange that a tree falls like that', a friend said while walking through Rafut Park, pointing to the red oak’s body, cradled gently by the earth. 'As if all the trees around it were trying to catch it.’’[1]
Neja Tomšič's practice departs from a slow observation of sites, noticing incidental or historical gestures within foliage, silence, and forgotten corners. It is at the enduring intersection between the botanical and the political that her works develop with a quiet urgency. In A garden, somewhat deserted, she invites us into a landscape of fragmented stories that challenge notions of indigeneity and belonging. The exhibition brings together drawings, watercolours, sculptural frames, bas-reliefs, embossed prints, and a multi-channel sound installation which are interlinked through a historiography of green spaces and the speculative imaginaries that they construct.
These presences in the exhibition grew from an inquiry of overlooked terrains that are physically distant from each other, yet connected by the movement of people, seeds, and ideas during the modern era. Tomšič constructs a temporal bridge between Rafut Park in Pristava, close to Nova Gorica, and a garden maintained by Slovenian women who migrated to Alexandria as care workers during the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. Her new works bring these spaces into contact, highlighting their overlapping histories and mapping their contributions to modern understandings of nature as something to be controlled and categorised. This relational approach brings forth questions about gardens, those who conceive them, and how they are remembered.
The series of watercolours was created following a period of fieldwork in Rafut Park and pays close attention to the materiality of the green space, depicting the fall of the oldest tree in the park (a red oak). They are a testament to the park as a place that bears scars of history and inscribes it in a lineage of green spaces that were influenced by the 19th century understanding of the metropolis, separating cities from nature which needed be domesticized and reconstructed. A series of embossed prints represent the cartography of the park and place it in dialogue with Gabriel Thouin's typology of gardens first published in 1819,[2] challenging the notion that these spaces can be reduced to a single type while also proposing new ones: the garden with a fallen tree, the garden of hybrid plants, or the erased garden.
Sporadically across the gallery space, Tomšič presents a series of bas-reliefs casts representing missing pieces from fragmented archaeological remnants of the altar from Petoviana (known today as Ptuj) depicting Nutrices, relics of a Celtic-Roman cult of maternity and motherhood. The motif of the imagined missing parts is based on oral histories of women who tended to the gardens of St. Francis Asylum and the cultural centre for Slovenian women in Alexandria, where they cultivated a native variety of Cichorium intybus. At a time whenthe private exotic park and the neo-oriental villa were being built by Anton Laščak in Pristava, women from this region migrated to Alexandria to work as wet nurses and domestic carers, travelling with seeds from home. The widespread chicory plant becomes the central decorative element of the bas-reliefs, bringing visibility to the everyday practices involved in maintaining families and places that were not monumentalised.
Throughout the exhibition, the motif of the garden recurs as a political and intimate site of resistance. In contrast to the colonial, male dominated tradition of exotic botanical collections designed to measure and display, the gardens tended to by Slovenian women in Alexandria appear to be almost invisible in history. The multi-channel sound installation reflects on the taxonomical categorisation of trees in Rafut Park, enunciating the names of those which survived and those which disappeared, as well as the scientific criteria used to establish their value as individual specimens. Tomšič worked with vocal group Ardeo and composer Gašper Torkar to create this work which builds on the notion of ritual calling and incantation, pleading for thetestimonies of the trees and evoking their symbolic space in relation to their scientific evaluation. In the series of drawings with a light palette, Tomšič gives form to an ‘empty’ landscape with minute details from the different periods of the green space which elude meaning: scattered stones, hidden roots, and shards of Villa Rafut or other buildings, folded into the earth after they were bombed during the first world war - all of which speak to the artist's sensitivity and determination to trace meaning.
Across mediums and motifs, the exhibition holds a subtle tension between natural growth and scientific categorisation, or between what is documented and what is felt. Tomšič treads the line between botany and mythology, reinterpreting history and engaging with speculative imaginaries. What kinds of knowledge do we allow to flower? Who gets to name, to map, and to archive? To walk through A garden, somewhat deserted is to enter a landscape shaped not only by species and stones, but also by the quiet labour of women who moved between worlds, leaving traces in soil, language, and lineage. In Tomšič’s hands, their memory becomes more than a subject of study: it is a ritual act of cultivation, of reclaiming what has long been silenced beneath the surface.
[1] Neja Tomšič, excerpt from a short text
[2] Plans Raisonnes De Toutes Les Especes De Jardins. Paris: Mme Huzard. C.1828.
Neja Tomšič
Neja Tomšič is research-based visual artist, storyteller, performer and ritual maker, working with drawing, objects and sound, interested in long processes and slow work. Her practice reflects on dominant historical narratives, researches into particularities, and creates situations in which new understandings of the present can be formed. She is a member of the Nonument Group, an art collective that maps, researches and intervenes into nonuments - public space, monuments and architecture that has undergone a shift in meaning due to political and social changes. The group was awarded the Plečnik medal for their contribution to architectural culture.
Her Opium Clippers performance saw more than 120 repetitions and was presented in 16 countries. Her artist book Opium Clippers published by Rostfrei Publishing was the recepient of the Best Slovenian Artist Book in 2017/2018 award and the Best Book Design at the Slovenian Book Fair. Neja also co-founded MoTA (Museum of Transitory Art), a Ljubljana-based research and production platform devoted to transitory art, where she worked as a producer and international projects coordinator between 2007 and 2020 and was the director of SONICA festival from 2017 to 2021. She lives and works in Ljubljana.
Nevena Aleksovski & Maja Babič Košir
Letters from the South
Nevena Aleksovski and Maja Babič Košir have, through years of collaboration, developed a distinctive artistic language, shaped by their commitment to multimedia and site-specific spatial interventions. Their latest project, Letters from the South (2024), exemplifies a visually rich narrative that seamlessly intertwines their kindred yet singular practices into a unified wall installation, combining drawing, collage, painting, readymade, and sculpture.
By weaving together diverse media, the artists treat the exhibition space itself as a blank canvas—gradually layering associations, fragments, and visual notations into a dynamic dialogue. What appears as light and playful collage work is charged with individual and collective memories, annotations of the past and reflections on the present, which the artists share as women, creators, precarious workers, and migrants. Their work is profoundly marked by the experience of displacement and the cultural legacy of former Yugoslavia—a territory that has, over recent decades, undergone radical social and political transformations: the collapse of socialism, the rise of neoliberalism, successive economic and health crises, a climate of uncertainty, and the sweeping digitalization of everyday life.
Within this shifting terrain of unstable politics and cultural dynamics, Aleksovski and Babič Košir explore questions of belonging and the elusive feeling of home, both in foreign and native environments. Their inquiry inevitably extends to issues of origin and identity. References to women’s struggles—historical and contemporary—deeply inform the imagery of their work, as well as their understanding of their own roles. They adopt a consciously engaged stance, acutely aware of the vulnerabilities inherited by today’s generation of women and the groundwork laid by their predecessors. Their feminine and sensuous aesthetics, with all their apparent fragility, reveal at their core motifs of emancipation and a quiet yet determined strength guiding their gestures and artistic decisions.
The layered nature of their joint installation, despite the intense interweaving of two closely related aesthetics, retains a sense of fragmentation and autonomy. Rather than dissolving their practices into a single indistinguishable whole, they allow for a freedom of co-existence—an intimate space where two visual languages unfold side by side. This is the fruit of long-term artistic exchange, grounded in mutual understanding, trust, and a willingness to delve into personal archives and family histories shaped by broader socio-political realities.
The element of sisterhood and solidarity, which has emerged from their collaborative process, imbues the work with an unmistakable optimism—an optimism that becomes both source and driving force of their hope, their search for alternative solutions, and their envisioning of freer futures.
As painters, sculptors, and illustrators, Aleksovski and Babič Košir are united by a shared visual vocabulary that embraces a refined, minimalist aesthetic. Their approach is deeply intuitive: in both solo and collaborative projects, they draw from their biographies and lived experiences as entry points into collective, research-driven artistic explorations.
Maja Babič Košir
Born in 1978, Ljubljana, SI
Lives and works between Ljubljana, Sl, and Porto, PT
Maja Babič Košir holds both a Bachelor's and Master's degree in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. Following her academic journey, she pursued advanced studies in creative illustration and visual communication at EINA University School of Design and Art in Barcelona.
Rooted in contemplative, introspective principles, her intuitive creative process draws from personal history and surroundings, translating inner experiences into a visually compelling narrative. The multidimensionality achieved through layering materials in installations challenges decorativeness, reflecting her background in contemporary sculpture. Her practice serves as a transformative archive, embracing imperfections, exploring the plasticity and sensory dimensions of recycled materials found in rich and well-preserved family archives.
In her versatile artistic practice, Maja often collaborates with established international artists, such as Duba Sambolec, Nevena Aleksovski, and Diana Tamane. Bound by their common positions as women and artists, through their artistic dialogue and minimalist visual language, the artists explore various contemporary societal issues.
She actively participates in international contemporary art fairs and shows, showcasing her work at established venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia; UGM Maribor Art Gallery; Cukrarna; ARCO; SPARK; Berlin Art Week; Vienna Contemporary; NADA and Zürich Art Weekend. She has won several awards and acknowledgments, and her works are housed in various private and public collections.
Nevena Aleksovski
Born in 1984, Bor, RS
Lives and works in Ljubljana, SI
Nevena Aleksovski earned her degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Novi Sad (RS), in 2008, and furthered her academic journey with a Master's degree in Cultural Studies from the University of Ljubljana (SI), in 2014. She has showcased her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions, among others at ŠKUC (SI), RAVNIKAR (SI), Britta Rettberg (DE), MGLC (SI), Cukrarna (SI), P74 Gallery (SI), PrivatePrint (MK), NADA Villa Warsaw (PL) as well as at various international art fairs including viennacontemporary, Art Rotterdam, Berlin Art Week, and others.
Drawing from personal experience, her focal point of artistic exploration always originates from the concept of migration, a phenomenon that has shaped human histories and societies. Her focus expands beyond migrant narratives to address the challenges faced by those labeled as Others in new environments, urging viewers to contemplate the human toll of exclusion and advocate for inclusivity. In her latest series, Southern, Southern, Aleksovski delivers an ironic message, exploring the dehumanization of people from southern regions through fetishized and harmful imaginings. Aleksovski's minimalist paintings and installation unravel the complexities of stereotypical views, prompting viewers to confront the implications of pervasive biases and fostering a dialogue towards a more inclusive global perspective.
In 2022 she published the book Melancholy of the Abandoned Lands, in collaboration with PrivatePrint Publishing, that tells the migration history of her family during Yugoslavia and after its dissolvement.
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